What makes the "airships and floating islands" campaign world so popular?

Airships are neat.

Skies of Arcadia

Sequel never

Every time I play a video game or RPG, the one thing that never fails to get me hard is fighting my way onto an airship, or spaceship, or boat, then exploding that airship/spaceship/boat from the inside out while I escape and leap to safety.

The addition of a 3rd dimension to the places where I can leap to safety, along with debris/islands/rock-bergs/other vehicles, introduces additional possibilities to the scenario. I can take control of the vehicle and crash it into another vehicle, or crash it into a land-berg. Maybe I set an explosive on the Spelljamming hull and use the floating islands as stepping stones to safety.

Really, all swashbuckling adventure (properly done) is just a variation on the fight-sabotage-escape format.

It's a mixture of tightly-gripped manchild obsession with pirates and swashbuckling, autistic "steampunk airships" aesthetic, and being too unimaginative to do anything interesting or innovative with a setting.

It's real pretty.

I, personally, am a fan of "floating islands and NO airships" as a setting instead. Waiting for floating islands to get close enough before casting out ropes to tie them together.

>tightly-gripped manchild obsession with pirates and swashbuckling

Could it be that if it's so "tightly gripped" that maybe swashbuckling is just cool and everyone enjoys it?

Skies of Arcadia and Crimson Skies. I draw tons of inspiration from them when I need to run a sky pirate campaign.

But how do you REALLY handle naval combat when 99% of systems handle it like ass?

>It provides a ready made justification for wildly different cultures being fairly close to each other, since most people will never leave their home island.
If there are airships, then there's going to be cultural contamination anyway.

If steampunk is wrong, I don't want to be right

You don't have to deal with autists bitching about potatoes.

Depends 100% on how common they are. If only large business ventures and the like can afford them that's pretty limited. This also leans pretty hard towards piracy, or a traveler style everyone owns some shares style game.

I do enjoy that game. Alliance mode especially, because coop airship Battlestar awesomeness. I was thinking about making an Admech Marauder Destroyer counts-as based on the Mobula, with twin autocannon and Heavy Bolter turrets and underslung Assault Cannon/Missiles.

Although my favourite ship is probably the Galleon just because of how it's basically like playing Edge Chronicles Skyshield: The Vidya. Now there's a setting that did airships right, and went kinda steampunk with Rook and Nate.

It's the symbolic meaning of flight, combined with motifs that conjure up the Age of Sail and the Age of Piracy

Play Jade Empire

Because gravity defying / flying on your own is one of the most popular global human dreams.

Because cogfop is somehow still popular.

Of course not. Nobody can enjoy things i don't enjoy.

Why post worst airship, user? Mobula forever.

Abstraction. Lots of Abstraction.

That wasn't a floating island setting.

Any examples or are you just telling us to pull some modern art out of our asses?

A ship to ship battle isn't something that needs hard and fast rules. Not in a character focused game, at least. It's more of an event that's happening around the PCs instead of having them directly involved. You don't need actual mechanics for something like that.

>Waiting for floating islands to get close enough before casting out ropes to tie them together.

>the capital city is just a bunch of smaller city islands held together by steel chains
>you traverse between the islands in trams that slide along the chains like old people on stair lifts

And so is a mass battle, or the aerial portion of one in a game about pilots, or a fleet action in a game where each player is a captain.

But none of those things could ever matter mechanically.

People like airships and floating islands, user, simple as that.

For some reason, the idea of pirate islands floating around and taking half a decade to reach its target and throwing out grappling hooks is hillarious.

Maybe they set up massive numbers of sails on the island itself and ride them around like ships.

Just because you're in a mass battle doesn't mean you need rules for shooting. Just because you're in an aerial battle doesn't mean you need rules for being a pilot, and just because you're on a ship doesn't mean you need rules for doing things with that ship.
Might as well go play on a free form forum if you don't want anything to be resolved in a directed manner.

Stepwise you're full of it.
I'm not familiar enough with rogue trader to say it does it right, but it certainly gives everyone aboard a single ship enough to do.

Island campaigns will always be popular because you can make every island very unique, almost a self-contained world. Airships are just a fad.

When I posted this exact idea here, people insulted me and called it "2randumb"
Go figure!

Doesn't rogue trader have void combat rules?

cause its "original" (or atleast people think it is.)

It's about privilege. In a Conan-esque grim-n-gritty setting, a poor barbarian can strike out on his own. In high fantasy like the Forgotten Realms, a farmer's daughter can be a weave-touched sorceress.

In a floating islands campaign, no-one is going anywhere without an expensive ship and a crew. No small groups, no overland treks. Infrastructure built by other people is required to live - and that's familiar to modern people who can't imagine a low or no-infrastructure life.

Could the weeb side of things be influenced by some Granblue nowadays?

>Mobula
But that ship is fucking ugly.

I prefer the aestethics of being a golden flying Jew in my over-designed Magnate.

That is my SECOND favorite ship. Mercantile forever, although I am sad about the laser nerf.

Standing off five hundred metres and burning bosses to death with five or six Lazor Beamz never got old.

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That's my guess. It's popular enough where people are going to want to play it, but inaccessible enough where they're going to settle for generic airships campaigns, and the rest of their group is going to have to clue and just think generic airships are back in fashion (and probably carry the idea to THEIR other groups.)

Admittedly it is a little silly and random, I was always of the opinion that shit like floating islands would be independent of the wind for whatever reason.

I literally have this as a thing in my D&D setting, although it's basically only large enough to play host to about 2500 people total.

Speaking of which, does anybody have any 'floating islands' type pictures, but at night? I find it nearly impossible to find, myself.

>He doesn't like going at mach 3 and balloon ramming people into walls.
That's a life not worth living
The Squid may not be the best ship, but it's the most ___fun

Going at only Mach 2.5 and roasting people BEFORE ramming them into a wall is more fun, though. And I will say the new darty little ship with the front-mounted Hwatcha is pretty good for that too.

It's hyper adventurer friendly.
Easy travel between distinct locations that allow piecemeal world building and a mobile home base for players to use for all their adventure needs plus the aesthetic sets the tone for somewhat whimsical fantasy adventure quite quickly

However I think it is garbage

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Are there any Veeky Forums recommend books that take place in such a setting?

I want to see airships and floating islands setting but not whimsical, and colorful but with suffering and war, war between islands and how floating islands and airships affects that, what kind of tactics would they use, etc And also imagine the setting taken to the future, not just industrial age but modern and beyond, cyberpunk setting with corporations controlling islands, home to the rich and wealthy while the poor and downtrodden live on
the surface.

But exploring a WWI-WWII era war on these islands would be cooler I think
imagine paratroopers from airships high above landing onto that island or dropping troops and equipment off. What about tanks, they would have the technology and the means but transport would be tricky, and its also interesting to consider a war between a nation living on the surface and one living entirely on the floating islands, and how the air war would be between those. Also no doubt every soldier that lands on an enemy island will be equipped with a parachute so they can easily retreat if needed without needed to risk airships to bring them back.

Actually another idea is this type of setting but with no one living on these islands, besides birds, etc and a world with 1600's era tech so no fancy flying machines, yet people still try to make it and explore these strange floating islands, especially those with hot air balloons. And imagine a colonial race for the floating land and how rival colonial powers would compete to develop the most effective method of getting troops and supplies and a stable base on an island and defending it from other colonial powers, with muskets and cannons, so that type of military hardware but in a completely different setting.

Those are just some ideas that came to mind I'm just spouting off, I never considered floating islands in such depth before but the pics here kind of inspired me. Also I love how its more free real estate without taking up actual surface space, also imagine some that ar

are large enough to have oceans on them, or maybe massive lakes like the great lakes. And imagine naval battles taking place on these floating island oceans, even if it doesnt make much sense and the ships would almost certainly have to be built on the island itself, its still an interesting idea.

I guess a lot of it also depends on how the floating islands behave, how far up are they, do they stay in one place and act like land mass but suspended high in the sky? Do they alternate height and do they rotate or are static, do they "orbit" the surface below or not stray far from where they always float? Can islands close by collide with each other and does that make them fuse or does that cause them to bounce off or somehow come crashing to the Earth below?

I never considered anything about this setting in such depth before but I am really liking it now.

Also I like how in essence they are just clouds but with solid surfaces. I often look at the massive cloud formations in the sky and wish they would stay like that and we could walk on them and explore them, so this setting is kind of like that. Makes me wonder why I never considered it more before.